The effect of a human agent’s external regulation upon college students’ hypermedia learning

In this study we examined the effectiveness of self-regulated learning (SRL) and externally regulated learning (ERL) on college students’ learning about a science topic with hypermedia during a 40-min session. A total of 82 college students with little knowledge of the topic were randomly assigned either to the SRL or ERL condition. Students in the SRL condition regulated their own learning, while students in the ERL condition had access to a human tutor who facilitated their self-regulated learning. We converged product (pretest–posttest declarative knowledge and qualitative shifts in participants’ mental models) with process (think-aloud) data to examine the effectiveness of SRL versus ERL. Analysis of the declarative knowledge measures showed that the ERL condition group mean was statistically significantly higher than the group mean for the SRL condition on the labeling and flow diagram tasks. There were no statistically significant differences between groups on the matching task, but both groups showed statistically significant increases in performance. Further analyses showed that the odds of being in a higher mental model posttest group were decreased by 65% for the SRL group as compared to the ERL group. In terms of SRL behavior, participants in the SRL condition engaged in more use of selecting new information sources, re-reading, summarizing, free searching, and enacting control over the context of their learning. In comparison, the ERL participants engaged in more activation of prior knowledge, utilization of feeling of knowing and judgment of learning, monitoring their progress toward goals, drawing, hypothesizing, coordination of information sources, and expressing task difficulty. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international conference of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AI-Ed 2007), Los Angeles, LA (July, 2007).     

The political dimension in ESE: the construction of a political moment model for analyzing bodily anchored political emotions in teaching and learning of the political dimension

This article departures from the understanding of environmental sustainable education (ESE) as a political project that consists of dissonant and conflicting voices. The aim of the article is to understand how affection, i.e. bodily sensations, transform into political emotions in teaching and learning settings. The article offers a philosophical and empirically based model called the ‘political moment model’ for analyzing bodily anchored political emotions in teaching and learning of the political dimension. The model was developed in response to an empirical case study where the data were somewhat confusing. In order understand the empirical data, we used parts of Mouffe’s theory of the political and various scholars’ work on political emotions and placed these aspects in a pragmatist standpoint of experience, emotions and meaning making. The model helped to investigate students’ experiences of the political dimension in situations where they experienced affection, i.e. bodily sensation, and emotions in connection with reflections and discussions about how to handle public issues of sustainable development. The article ends with a theoretical discussion of the findings in order to understand the political dimension in teaching and learning activities and to discern possible directions for future research on political moments in ESE.     

Reshaping the Nordic education model in an era of efficiency. Changes in the comprehensive school project in Denmark,Norway, and Sweden since the millennium

The Nordic Education Model was an important part of the social democratic welfare state for many years in the second half of the 20th century. Since the millennium, transnational agencies have drawn education from the realm of politics into a global market place by advocating strategies such as efficiency, competition, decentralisation, governing by detailed objectives, control, privatisation, and profile schools. This article gives brief accounts of major trends in current school development policies, discourses, and practices in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden since the millennium, and explores how the values of the Nordic model are affected by the new policies. It is argued that the Nordic model still exists as the predominant system for the large majority of Scandinavian children at a national level, but that a number of new technologies aiming to increase the efficiency of teaching and learning are gradually undermining the main values of the Nordic model.     

教与学

注重创造积极的课堂气氛,促使学生自然地学会目标语言.     

Institutional traditions in teachers’ manners of teaching

The aim of this article is to make a close case study of one teacher’s teaching in relation to established traditions within science education in Sweden. The teacher’s manner of teaching is analysed with the help of an epistemological move analysis. The moves made by the teacher are then compared in a context of educational philosophy and selective tradition. In the analyses the focus is to study the process of teaching and learning in action in institutionalised and socially shared practices. The empirical material consists of video recordings of four lessons with the same group of students and the same teacher. The students are all in Year 7 in a Swedish 9-year compulsory school. During these lessons the students work with a subject area called “Properties of materials”. The results show that the teacher makes a number of different moves with regard to how to proceed and come to a conclusion about what the substances are. Many of these moves are special in that they indicate that the students need to be able to handle the procedural level of school science. These moves do not deal directly with the knowledge production process, but with methodological aspects. The function of the moves turns the students’ attention from one source of knowledge to another. The moves are aimed at helping the students to help themselves, since it is through their own activity and their own thinking that learning takes place. This is characteristic in the teacher’s manner of teaching. When compared in a context of educational philosophy, this manner of teaching has similarities with progressentialism; a mixture of essentialism and progressivism. This educational philosophy is a central aspect of what is called the academic tradition—a selective tradition common in science education in Sweden between 1960 and 1990.     

Crowdsourcing interactions: using crowdsourcing for evaluating interactive information retrieval systems

In the field of information retrieval (IR), researchers and practitioners are often faced with a demand for valid approaches to evaluate the performance of retrieval systems. The Cranfield experiment paradigm has been dominant for the in-vitro evaluation of IR systems. Alternative to this paradigm, laboratory-based user studies have been widely used to evaluate interactive information retrieval (IIR) systems, and at the same time investigate users’ information searching behaviours. Major drawbacks of laboratory-based user studies for evaluating IIR systems include the high monetary and temporal costs involved in setting up and running those experiments, the lack of heterogeneity amongst the user population and the limited scale of the experiments, which usually involve a relatively restricted set of users. In this paper, we propose an alternative experimental methodology to laboratory-based user studies. Our novel experimental methodology uses a crowdsourcing platform as a means of engaging study participants. Through crowdsourcing, our experimental methodology can capture user interactions and searching behaviours at a lower cost, with more data, and within a shorter period than traditional laboratory-based user studies, and therefore can be used to assess the performances of IIR systems. In this article, we show the characteristic differences of our approach with respect to traditional IIR experimental and evaluation procedures. We also perform a use case study comparing crowdsourcing-based evaluation with laboratory-based evaluation of IIR systems, which can serve as a tutorial for setting up crowdsourcing-based IIR evaluations.     

Studying Headteachers' Professional Lives: Getting the life history

In order to obtain a better understanding of how headteachers frame their professional lives, a comparative project was set up with a life history approach. A series of open-ended interviews were conducted where headteachers talked about themselves, their work, background, experiences and career. The article focuses on the modes of inquiry used in the study and explores alternative approaches to analysis, especially of content and form. Several methodological issues are discussed, for instance the production of data as an interactive and collaborative process of creating meaning, the central role of the research relations, dialogical analysis and how to move from separate individual stories to an analysis of headteachers' lives across different countries. As the analysis has unfolded, new questions have been posed about the comparative aspect of the project. At the beginning, cross-national similarities and differences were relatively straightforward and were found in the content of interviews. Since then, explorations of the form and structure of the stories have raised more complex juxtapositions. More recently, new questions have begun to emerge, such as about the nature and meanings of 'professional confidence' and its relationship to external accountability in national contexts.     

Evaluation of retrieval effectiveness with incomplete relevance data: Theoretical and experimental comparison of three measures

This paper investigates two relatively new measures of retrieval effectiveness in relation to the problem of incomplete relevance data. The measures, Bpref and RankEff, which do not take into account documents that have not been relevance judged, are compared theoretically and experimentally. The experimental comparisons involve a third measure, the well-known mean uninterpolated average precision. The results indicate that RankEff is the most stable of the three measures when the amount of relevance data is reduced, with respect to system ranking and absolute values. In addition, RankEff has the lowest error-rate.